The Key Is..are we getting too paranoid?

paranoia is part of survival mode

 

Now that's funny. Don't forget to wear an "antimicrobial" brass bracelet when using.

If a person truly "thinks" things are that bad or a person is that susceptible, just wear exam gloves.

 

Stock up on Lysol, Clorox and UV lights as well as hypodermic needles.

 

ElectricMe, I like how you can write what you are thinking. As we all have been trudging along trying to avoid Covid-19, I have often wondered if we will ever again feel safe. My favorite past time besides using my hands making or fixing things is sports! Golf, Tennis, Baseball, Soccer, Football and Basketball are my year round escapisms. Of course, this is gone!

We can all relate to it being bottom of the ninth, bases are loaded. Strike out king on the mound, base hitter is at bat, and everybody in the stands are on their feet, hugging, gripping, yelling.......or.............3 seconds left of a triple overtime basketball game and the star player is sprinting across the court, everybody in the stands are on their feet, hugging, gripping, yelling.............I could go on, but you get my point. The emotion of human touching even reaches us through our flat screens, why? because the community of the sport takes us there!

Using this theme, I like Electricme's reasoning about hugging at sporting events or, because of a sporting event. How many times have we all followed our favorite player or team all year, its down to the wire, now or nothing, and the player or team wins! Even if you are at home or in a home among friends, ain't know feeling in the world than starting the obligatory "high five" around the room!

For me, the Covid-19 thing has stripped me of my primary joy of being able to reach out and connect with another human being physically. Sure, I have spent the last 6 weeks holed up in my house with my wife and adult kids. But as a family, we are always together. When we go out to get our necessities, as soon as we get home, its back to the big scrub down routine. Its the friends, the big get togethers, my familar workers at the Starbucks who always said "hello" to me that I miss. And this 6 foot rule really keeps us a apart (for good reasons of course), but I too am talking about when Covid-19 is over.

Yeah, I've done the Bluejeans, Zoom and whatever else is out their thing on the internet. It aint the same. Being close and being able to touch phyically another human being without worrying about getting a dreadful virus is just so plain a part of who we are. Elephants do it. Whales and Dolphins do it. ........and, we do it.

When this is over, I will remember all those people who I didn't get to see weekly when I shop............and say hello with a big smile!

 

True writing has become a lost art. Most people don't know what a sentence structure is! However, there are lots of businesses all over that are looking for people who can write, or, copywrite for them. To me, writing is having the ability to articulate something through words, so that another person can understand. I would think with your talent, you may be able to start a blog about something that you are passionate about, and knowledgeable about to create a following. Its rare to read blogs that truly have content to the words. Just my two cents.

 

Have no fear.
Mankind has never learned lessons from past disasters longer than a very short period of time.
This timeframe seems to get shorter and shorter as we ‘progress’.

 

yep, once the paranoia ends, the party begins!

 

That's exactly what we're doing still. The risks have changed some, so the balance has changed some.

There's that old saw about insanity being when you do the same thing over and over expecting the results to be different.

But if that makes sense, so does its corollary: it's also insane to keep doing the same thing knowing that conditions have changed, yet somehow expecting the results not to be different.

Remember this chart I made ten days ago?



Remember it was ten days ago, which makes it out of date already. The rightward motion has slowed thanks to distancing measures, from its original clip of another zero every week or two. It is now, today, about halfway from its last shown position over to the next (1 in 100) power of ten. It has not stopped, and it is not moving leftward yet.

Well, that's the key changed circumstance. This one never has been part of our existence on the planet before now, and our immune systems don't know squat about what to do with it. The last comparable situation was over a hundred years ago, which puts it (unless we have some centenarian PriusChat members I don't know about) completely outside the life experience of anyone in this conversation.

If you have a concern "will we stay 'snakebit' forever after this go-round?", you'll be happy to note that we didn't after that one, though at the time there were some serious adjustments made to arrange for more people to survive.

If you also have a concern "will we at least not forget what this is like, take surveillance and preparation seriously, and try to catch the next one a few zeros earlier?" the history isn't as encouraging, but I'm guessing we'll want to do better.

It'll be pretty clear when it's ok to do that. There will come a time, maybe in the next year or so, when we pretty much all have immune systems that know this thing, like they know the other ones we've shared the planet with for longer. Whether because we've had it and survived, or because of a vaccine. At that point we can return to living our lives trusting our immune systems, and not just out of nostalgia, but because then we can, you know, trust our immune systems.

There might be some few of our former habits that don't come back quite as fast or maybe at all, and probably that'll be ok. And we'll probably not be too stingy with funding the science to watch out for the next thing, given that we'll remember we didn't like this one much.

When the risk of doing those things has returned to somewhere near where it was when we were doing them before.

 

i use my elbow, save 25 bucks. sneeze on the inside, push with the outside

 

Didn't seem to me like even the original post was really all that much about the Key.

 

the key unlocked the maelstrom...

 

Ah that explains it ... I personally was being dour and deadly serious.

 

10 submarine patrols pretty much eradicated any residual germphobia that I had after growing up....er...biologically.
Years later....I have grandchildren, and when times get back to normal, I will start attending my local church again.

This means that I will soon be hugging and kissing everybody in my county either directly or by proxy.

Fear is a personal thing...
Flying in a commercial airliner utterly terrifies me, but I simply have no built-in fear of the Covids, at least the bug itself.
Perhaps if I got sick more often, or more severely I might be more afraid of it, but I'm just not.
I had a (for me) fairly severe bug in December/January and all of the medicine in my house was years out of date.

My efforts to date have been directed at not spreading the disease.
Since I'm "essential" I do have to leave the house every day, but I keep masks and sprays handy and try to maintain social distancing.
Since I'm blessed to live in a small town in the deep south, the challenge lies in the fact that the locals are not "socially distant" types of people....(they do not consider ME to be a local because I've only been here for 25 years.)

Fear is NOT a constant.
Some people in my orbit are extremely fearful of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, but as a proud Hoosier, I grew up in a time where a violent afternoon thunderstorm meant that it was going to cool down that afternoon - and we had basements to deal with the accompanying twisters.

No big deal.

However (comma!) recently I was called out at night to deal with a network outage, and I got close enough to an F2 to have to take shelter under an overpass, and the experience rattled me to a state of fear that normally accompanies an airliner door thunking shut.
So...there's no telling what kind of dimple that experience left on me, or whether my next encounter with severe weather will be different from all of the others.

The Covids?
Sorry.
Ain't feelin it.
The economic implosion will have downrange effects that I fear more than the bug itself.

 

Excuse me for my ignorance, but what is an F2?